Take a look at a great solution that would bring high-end sound to your laptop. Beside its compact form-factor, it features the highest playback/recording quality, excellent performance in games, and compatibility with sound-recording software and media players. Read more about such a winning features combination of this product in our detailed review.

Closer Look at the Device and Accessories

The case of this PCMCIA card is sealed, so its internals remained a mystery to me. On the outside, there are two mini-jack connectors (headphones output and line/microphone input) combined with optical SPDIF output and input, respectively. The special connector between them can take in a cable for connecting the card to 5.1 and higher speaker systems. To attach the latter you have to use a non-standard four-conductor mini-jack; this is a peculiar feature of all audio cards from Creative that support 5.1 and higher speaker systems.

Besides the card and the above-mentioned cable, the box includes a pouch for the device, rather good ear-phones, a user’s manual, a DVD Audio disc, and CDs with drivers and game demos.

There is also a paper sheet that informs you that the notebook’s integrated audio system won’t work if you use the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook (but the new version of the Feature Mode Selection utility permits you to use the integrated audio alongside with the Audigy) and describes how you should extract the card from the slot (you should first run the Safely Remove Hardware utility).

The software pack from Creative hasn’t changed much since the release of the Audigy 2 ZS, so you can refer to our previous reviews for details about it. But now that we deal with a PCMCIA device, the software pack includes one new utility which will be described in the next section.